Tuesday Was A Good Day: My Experience at Dribbble Hang Time LA 2018

One week ago. It's Tuesday, December 4, 2018.

4:50am: The first of four scheduled iPhone alarms goes off. I quickly toggle down the volume rocker and extinguish the first annoyance of the day.

4:59am: The snooze timer alerts me that while I did get those nine additional minutes of rest, now it’s time to make the decision: Are we staying in this warm burrito of pillows and sheets or getting our act together, like right now? If I let this 21st century noisemaker sound for much longer, my far better half and much lighter sleeper of a fiancée, Kasey is going to let me know about it. Her tone will be less than exuberant. Luckily for her, this day is different. I roll out of bed, turning off the remaining alarms and begin to get ready.

I work from home. I specify that here as opposed to saying “I work remotely”, because I do not, in fact, hardly ever “work remotely”. I have a home office with your typical designer’s setup: a MacBook Pro paired to an external monitor through a dongle-factory that Apple has so clearly… okay, let’s digress before this derails any further.

All of this to say, I am accustomed to a daily “commute” which, at its longest, takes 60 seconds for me to stumble-walk downstairs to my desk. But, on this beautiful — albeit brisk-even-for-Southern-California — morning, in early December, I am going to do what millions of Los Angeles residents (insert acknowledgement of the “correct” term “Los Angelenos”, okay, now moving right along) do daily: brave the early morning, rush-hour traffic. I’ve elected to wake up this early to get downtown to the Ace Hotel before many of the surrounding coffee shops open their doors. Today, I’m attending Dribbble Hang Time Los Angeles.

Getting my things together and grabbing a quick bite has me out the door by 5:30am and I’m looking at a 45 minute drive into the city. I do not know what to expect but I’ve been looking forward to this event for months.

I grab a seat in the Ace Hotel’s Coffee Counter cafe and get some work done for an hour or so (looks like I am a remote worker after all). The conference doesn’t officially kick off until 10am but I’m attending a workshop with the visual design powerhouse duo DKNG at 8am, so I close up my laptop and make my way upstairs.

They introduce themselves, and give backstory of how they got into design (hint: early band posters for local acts). I’ve been a fan of these guys for quite some time and just getting to hear their process was worth being here today.

For those not familiar with their work, DKNG create digital art that often combines two or more items and blends them together to tell a visual story. A small snippet of this artwork can be seen below.

For this workshop, DKNG gives us a glimpse at their approach in creating this kind of artwork. I won’t go into too many details, as you should check out one of their events in person, but, I will say that we got to create a live form of this style of work in an effort to better understand the thinking behind it.

We have approximately 30 minutes to collaborate with our partner — simply, the person sitting next to us — using only analog tools (markers, paper, scissors, ruler, etc.) to create our own version of a DKNG-style piece. My partner Deepak and I get to work. We decide that our piece will blend technology and music in a device that features piano keys where a typical keyboard would appear, with computer internals that can run a multitude of operating systems (hey, why not dream?) on the same device.

Once we create our “art”, everyone is given a chance to present their work to the group. I find this exercise to be a great reminder of how often we regularly rely on our digital drawing aides. Getting outside of my usual, digital ecosystem really reinforces design forethought. It’s much easier to Command + Z your way out of a problem, but sometimes pen and paper allows for a better approach to solving a design task.

After the workshop, we make our way downstairs and next door to The Theatre for a day of talks. This place is every bit deserving of the traditional “theatre” spelling, too. No movie-popcorn-cinema styling here. I’ve included a photo I did not take to demonstrate the beauty of a place I did in fact visit.

I won’t recap all of the talks that day but I will highlight a few:

• Amy and Jennifer Hood of Hoodzpah Design showed us that you don’t need a typical path to accomplish your career goals. For them, taking a number of sidesteps from their original path actually resulted in landing the dream clients and a career that they control.
• Pablo Stanley reminded us that accessibility is a very real issue for millions of users of digital tools and that it’s not at all an impossible problem to tackle in our everyday design work.
• Haraldur Thorleifsson of ueno, enlightened us — and nearly brought me to tears on more than one occasion — with four stories of how a life of less than fortunate situations has created his genuine appreciation for the world. His talk awe-inspiring monologue was one of (if not absolutely) the most inspirational presentations of human perseverance I’ve experienced. I will continue to replay his words in my head as a reminder of all I’ve been given and all I can continue to do to make this world a little less crappy.

Following the final talk, we collectively spill out into the lobby for a happy hour. That “hour” lasts several as the best ones tend to do, and I meet even more incredible humans. The takeaway here is not the CVs of these people; it is the kindness. Everyone I met at this event was kind. They wouldn’t just hold the door open for you, they would ask you what you do and how you are liking it. They would ask you for your life story and actually stick around to hear it. This was a gathering of kindness. That is increasingly rare in this world and I don’t remark that cynically. Rather, it makes me genuinely appreciate the rarity of this kindness and the display of it I experienced.

In closing out this wall of words, I want to say, “thank you.” Thank you to Dan and Rich for creating Dribbble. Thank you to the entire Dribbble team for hosting such a wonderful event. Thank you to all of the speakers at Hang Time Los Angeles for traveling from many miles away to provide your stories to all of us in attendance.

And of course, thank you. Yeah, you. Thank you for even reading this post. I think there will be more of these to come in the near future. Until that time, have a truly wonderful day.